The Battle for Hearts and Minds

"Once people understand that there is hope in life, even when that life is limited or entails suffering, they will be unwilling to embrace death as a solution to problems. In the end, the struggle to protect the lives of people like Terri Schiavo is a battle of hope against despair." 

      From "Hope vs. Despair: Remembering Terri Schiavo," written by Rev. Robert Johansen

[www.nationalreview.com/comment/johansen200603310740.asp]

We are one week removed from the first anniversary of the death of Terri Schindler Schiavo. Like many of you I prayed for the longest time that hearts might be changed. Terri died after nearly two weeks without food or water. Her death is a stain on our nation's honor and a reminder that the medically vulnerable live (and die) in very perilous times.

During the long legal battle fought by Terri's family and Michael, her estranged husband, Rev. Johansen wrote many extremely eloquent, exquisitely reasoned essays. I've included the link for his recent National Review online piece at the beginning of today's edition of TN&V, so I will just highlight a few points.

When advocates learn their pro-life ABCs, the first chapter in their primer is titled, "The Power of Language." It's like the army that commands the heights. Whoever controls the way the terms of a debate are framed has a gigantic advantage.

There are probably fewer more menacing terms than "persistent vegetative state" (PVS). Even people of good will (I know because I have heard them) unthinkingly lapse into rhetoric about "vegetables" when they discuss severely brain-injured patients.

And you simply don't worry about cutting ethical corners when the person is no longer seen as a flesh-and-blood human being but a vegetating object.

Once the trial judge accepted the diagnosis that Terri was in a PVS, all the prejudices that stick to that dehumanizing acronym made saving Terri immeasurably more difficult. From that day forward, her family played catch-up.

To no avail they implored the judge to order additional, more advanced tests which were much more likely to give an objective assessment of Terri's condition than were the subjective opinions of a bevy of "experts" who always find people severely brain injured to be in a PVS.

On the night of the day Terri died, Dr. Bernadine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health and medical columnist for U.S. News & World Report, appeared on the Larry King Show. She has this to say.

"I'm speaking only as a doctor. And I guess my focus is on the patient here. ..

"I think the issue is did -- did this woman, did this young woman have an adequate neurological evaluation by today's standards? And I think if one looks carefully at the case, you find that she has not had a neurological evaluation of the kind she should have had since 2002. And at that time, Larry, it was inadequate by today's standards.

"She didn't have the clinical detailed evaluation, in terms of time, in terms of full evaluation over a period of several days. And she also did not have the technology studies that she should have had. ...

"If she had that, then it would have been a very, very different debate."

Rev. Johansen immediately puts this tragedy in its wider context. "Terri's death was not the product of some nefarious conspiracy, but it was the result of a tragic confluence of currents within our culture. These currents — in the law, in medicine, and in the organs of popular culture — all came together in Terri's case, and what happened to her was the newest face of what Pope John Paul II called the Culture of Death."

Significantly, he adds, "This new face was masked, as the old had always been, by error, half-truths, comfortable fictions, and outright deception. ...The shift in our culture that made her death possible began long before March 31, 2005, and the elements of that shift need to be identified if we are to learn from what happened."

Those changes include a de-sanctification of the value of each individual life. For many "experts," life is no longer intrinsically valuable, but worth "preserving" or “prolonging" (notice how demeaning such words are) only when the patient meets their standards. It is impossible to exaggerate how much damage this new view--that "continued human life requires justification"--has done to our cultural fabric.

And, of course, hand-in-hand with this outlook goes changing the criteria for "personhood," which we witnessed in the successful campaign to scrap the abortion laws of all 50 states. Law articles have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms arguing, for example, that the "most critical moral, legal, and constitutional" basis for personhood is neo-cortical function or “consciousness.”

As Rev. Johansen writes, George Felos, the attorney for Terri's estranged husband, “used this argument in one of Terri's 2001 appellate proceedings, saying that the litmus test for personhood is 'whether or not a person can bring a spoon to their mouth.'"

Likewise food and water have become "treatment" and "futile care" has been redefined to mean anything that does not cure the underlying condition, Rev. Johansen writes. "Once it has been decreed, through linguistic sleight-of-hand, that feeding the patient is 'futile,' only a short step remains to justifying its withdrawal.”

Terri’s case galvanized many in the pro-life movement in an unparalleled way. They are now working with the Schindlers "to promote and lobby for legislation that would offer greater protection to those whom some in our society would deem unworthy of continued life," Rev. Johansen writes.

"They, and many others, are working to create a network of doctors, lawyers, and clergy who are knowledgeable about the legal, medical, and moral issues involved in end-of-life cases and who can be trusted to approach them from a 'reverence for life' point of view."

Rev. Johansen is quite correct: ultimately, as is always the case, this is a struggle for people's hearts and mind. Let me close where I began, with this from Rev. Johansen.

"Once people understand that there is hope in life, even when that life is limited or entails suffering, they will be unwilling to embrace death as a solution to problems. In the end, the struggle to protect the lives of people like Terri Schiavo is a battle of hope against despair.”

Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.